Posted by: Robin Amer on October 20, 2005 01:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

So I'm staying up much later than I ought to, considering how early I have to get up tomorrow. But that's my M.O. the night before I travel...stay up very, very late. Pack...watch some weird West Wing special on t.v. ...obsess over whether to bring fun shoes or sensible shoes...and write! Always a good excuse. I'm excited to blog conference this year (sanctioned! by Jay!) especially now that I've cut my teeth blogging a little for Open Source.

I can't believe this will be my fifth straight year at Third Coast. I think I said the same thing last year (only, uh, it was my fourth straight year) and Julie (Shapiro)'s response was something to the effect of, well, I guess you're a lifer. I guess so.

I love going to Third Coast. I can trace my evolution in radio thus far through my attendance at this conference. And I feel like I owe a lot to this conference. Were it not for Third Coast, I would not have my present job, my present interests/obsessions, or most of my friends & contacts in the radio world. My first year at the conference I was a pretty young go-getter, doing radio documentary at school, and I remember meeting people like Gregory Whitehead, Kaye Mortley, Scott Carrier and John Biewen of American Radioworks, and kind of swooning. Professional and artistic inspiration/crushes, old and new. Being exposed to the European style of features radio as presented by Kaye (impressionistic, painterly, personal, memoir-eque) was an especially big deal for me.

If I try to dig up too many other details from years past, or separate one year from the next, things start to swim a little bit. But I do remember these things: hearing Chris Brooks from the CBC play snippets of Peter Leonard Braun's Bells of Europe, and what a revelation that was...meeting Roman Mars and bonding over D.C. punk music...watching a new friend from the Salt Institute sneak off from one of the sessions to play fiddle with the banjo player from the Books on some random private yacht that happened to be sailing by on the river behind the hotel....Joe Frank's quasi-bizarre live performance (interpretive dancer?! And did anyone realize that David Lynch turned his radio pieces into black and white movies for the Playboy Channel circa 1985?!)...Anna Friz's beautiful, eerie performance involving her pirate radio transmitters set up around the Art Institute's theater in place of speakers (Berlin, Rome, London, Moscow, are you out there?)...hearing Alan Coukell play snippets of the most amazing live reporting from five decades of radio (made me think that the gulf between journalism and art wasn't a severe as I feared)...fantastic PRX dance party on the top floor of some building in industrial Chicago, and hanging out on the roof there with Ben Walker and radio my girl pals from school...Anne Hepperman and Cara Oehler's 'Thirst' short doc about Mexicans dying of thirst in the desert as they try to cross into the US, and the one under 'Dark' by Jude Fletcher called Momento Mori about taking pictures of the dead.

That's enough for now. Now for my valiant attempts to go to sleep. At least I won't have to stay up 'till 5am finishing a print story on deadline like I had to on the first night of the conference last year...

More from Third Coast Festival 2005 :
« Starting to Think About It | The Most Violent Wedding Cake Fight Ever Caught on TV! »